Alexander Fleming

person · earth · London, England

Scottish bacteriologist (1881–1955) working at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, who in September 1928 observed the lysis of staphylococci around a Penicillium colony on a discarded culture plate and named the active substance penicillin. He published in 1929, could not purify or stabilise the compound, and largely set the work aside; he had earlier discovered lysozyme, in 1922. He shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Florey and Chain, and used his Nobel lecture to warn that under-dosing would select for resistant organisms — a prediction that has been comprehensively confirmed. Fleming's case is a useful corrective to the discovery-narrative habit: the observation was his, the drug was Oxford's, and the twelve-year gap between them was a failure of chemistry and funding rather than of insight.